“With this buffet, I make you a knight. Never accept another from any but the King. Know the law of war. Love your friends and be harsh to your enemies.” He leaned down and kissed the young man on both cheeks.
Jehan-Ser Jehan-was stunned. He began to weep.
De Vrailly vaulted onto his horse.
The Galles gave a thunderous cheer.
Ser Gabriel sat silently watching the Galles. They had a few Alban banners among them, mostly Towbray’s, and Towbray himself was on the far left-the Galles plainly didn’t trust him. Perhaps the feeling was mutual.
He flicked a glance at his Occitan allies. It was not that he distrusted them, as that he feared their anger and the prince’s rash judgment.
Behind him, Ser Michael spat. “I wouldn’t have believed that my own father would come to this.”
“You could be King,” Gabriel said.
“That’s not even funny,” Michael commented.
“You know what’s worst about civil war?” Gabriel asked. The Galles were talking about something, and someone was kneeling.
The company was already dismounting. Cuddy groused, loudly, “I want to see ’em fight. Better them than me. I don’t get to be fuckin’ King.”
Gabriel laughed and gestured at Cuddy. “That’s about it. In a civil war, everyone realizes that it’s all a dream and anyone can be King. And then we’re just animals fighting over the grain supply.”
The herald, his pennon flapping bravely, was riding towards them.
“Aha,” Gabriel said. “Here we go.”
His heart began to beat very hard.
Ser Michael turned. “We can take them, Gabriel,” he said.
Gabriel nodded. “We can, but some of us will die and some of them will die, and my adversary will win with every corpse. Let’s make this as cheap as we can.”
“If you lose?” Michael asked bluntly.
“Then I get to relax, and stop plotting. It’s all on you and my brother and Tom and Sauce. And Mr. Smythe and Harmodius and the Queen. And Amicia, and the rest of the people. The biggest revelation of the last few weeks has been that it’s not all about me, Michael. Muddle through.” He laughed.
“What do I do about the Galles?” Michael said, ignoring the rest.
“Offer them ships home. If they refuse, crush them here, take the losses, and offer no quarter. Towbray will desert them the moment he knows it’s you.” The Red Knight shrugged. “Make yourself King for all I care. I’ll be dead.”
“I doubt it,” Michael said. “Here, let me squire you one last time. Damn, that was ill-said.”
Gabriel laughed.
While Michael dealt with the way his arms tied on and where they sat, the herald approached.
“Ser Jean de Vrailly will meet you man to man in single combat,” he said.
The Red Knight took a lance from Toby. He thought of leaving a parting message for Amicia, or for Blanche, even.
That seemed like something Mater would have done.
“If I win,” he said, “I want you ready to march north immediately.”
He wanted to grin or smile, but his heart was pounding, and his cheeks didn’t work.
So instead, he turned his horse, and began to ride easily over the hayfield towards the distant shining figure of Jean de Vrailly.
Inside de Vrailly’s visor, the angelic face frowned as he rode across the sunlit summer field.
Usually he went to fight without a thought-beyond, perhaps, a prayer.
No prayer came to his lips.
Instead, unbidden, a host of images rose like midges and mosquitoes. Simultaneously, he considered how the Red Knight had dispatched de Rohan, who, for all his faults, he had trained with his own hands, and he considered the sparkling fall of holy water that had declared him forfeit-a flow of holy water that said that his person, or his harness, was ensorcelled. He thought of the black fire clawing at the angel’s armour in his tent, and he thought-most of all-of how his angel-
I think your angel is a daemon, said the ghost of D’Eu in his ear.
De Rohan had accused the Queen of sorcery and infidelity. And died.
Why does my angel never name the Red Knight?
Why has he ceased to speak of God?
Why did he not give me any answers?
But the utmost thought in de Vrailly’s mind was one of mingled shame and apprehension, two thoughts which he seldom entertained. Because he had willingly donned the armour that had been tainted with sorcery, this day. He had other choices.
His lance went down into the rest with the ease of ten thousand repetitions.
He saw his opponent’s arms-the six-pointed stars on the brilliant scarlet ground.
I have other choices. I hate. I doubt.
Everything.
And then his lance was just there.
Gabriel sweated behind his visor. He watched de Vrailly with most of his attention. He tried to focus on the man’s movements, on his horse.
De Vrailly had a superb horse.
But behind the simplicity of preparation for combat was fear-the fear of death over all, and under that a layer of other fears like folded steel, each fear interwrapped with minute flaws and other hesitations like the dragon’s breath of a blade folded over and over again in the forge to try and hide the imperfections in the iron and the steel.
Fear for the Queen, and fear for Michael confronting his father, and fear for the world that he loved and fear that he had behaved badly, that he would die badly, that he would fail.
Gabriel Muriens usually entered combat, which he feared more than anything else in his life, borne along on the heady river of command. With no time to examine the reality of what he faced, he entered into combat like a black mirror-empty and yet full. His imagination rarely had time to inflate the bladder of his cowardice.
But today he had a long bowshot to cross on a horse he could not afford to tire early-a near eternity in which to think. To imagine. To wonder.
Gavin was the better jouster. But de Vrailly was now the commander of the army, and would not have accepted a lesser man or rank. And Gavin’s already gone west. In a day or two, he’ll find Mountjoy. I hope.
In his vivid and coloured fantasy, Gabriel saw himself unhorsed, saw de Vrailly’s lance smash through his breastplate to rip his intestines from his back-saw his helmet shred under a blow, saw Ataelus stumble and fall in the grass, saw Ataelus crash to earth under the hammer of de Vrailly’s deadly lance, saw the minute twist of his deadly hands as de Vrailly slapped his own lance to the ground and unhorsed him with delicate ease, saw the crashing mace blow that ended his life, saw de Vrailly chivalrously dismount to pound him to the earth with his sword-
Saw every man who’d ever unhorsed him. Relived every painful fall, every bruise, every humiliation as the quintain slapped him, as his lance missed its mark, as he caught a foot in the stirrup going down-a long, long, silly fall, and all his brothers laughing, his master-at-arms laughing, even Pru, her apron covering her face.
Ah, yes, he thought. They were not doubts, but the sordid realities of a hundred failures-some real, some fancied. As a magister, he knew that the line between them was very thin indeed.
Mater is dead. Odd-a piercing sorrow he never expected, and a vast tide of shameful relief. Whatever happened in the next ten heartbeats, neither the Earl of Westwall nor the duchess would ever mention it, being dead.
He dropped his lance from erect to the lance rest under his right arm without any sense of volition.
He refused to enter his palace. In the strange labyrinth that was his idea of chivalry, to calm himself artificially in his palace in this one fight would be to cheat.
And because all the flaws in the dragon’s breath, when forged by a master, make a stronger blade. All the flaws.